Patanjali's Yogasutra: A Psychological Study

Patañjali’s Yogasūtra

Patañjali’s Yogasūtra

A Psychological Study

K. Ramakrishna Rao

Cataloging in Publication Data — DK

[Courtesy: D.K. Agencies (P) Ltd. ]

Rao, K. Ramakrishna, author.

Patañjali's Yogasūtra : a psychological study/K.

Ramakrishna Rao.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Patañjali. Yogasūtra. 2. Psychology — India. 3. Yoga — Psychological aspects. I. Title.

LCC B132.Y6R36 2018 | DDC 181.452 23

ISBN: 978-81-246-1000-8

First published in India, 2019

© K. Ramakrishna Rao

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior written permission of both the copyright owner, indicated above, and the publisher.

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Dedicated to

Shri Narendra Modi

The Hon’ble Prime Minister of India

As a humble tribute for his outstanding

Contributions towards promoting Yoga in general and

for initiating the move to designate 21st June

as International Yoga Day by the

United Nations in particular

Preface

My interest in yoga is long standing. I have been involved in theoretical studies as well as experimental research on yoga for over fifty years. I have had the privilege of establishing the Institute of Yoga and Consciousness and the Yoga Village under the aegis of Andhra University when I was its head. Dr Zail Singh, President of India at that time, inaugurated the Institute located in Vizianagaram Palace donated to the University by Shri P.V.G. Raju, the Maharaja of Vizianagaram, whom I had known personally. My empirical studies involved phenomenological and experimental work at the Department of Psychology and Parapsychology at Andhra University. Among these studies one that stands out in my mind is the research we conducted on Yogiraj Vaidyaraj. With the equipment brought from the Menninger Institute in the US, we along with Elmar Green and his wife monitored the physiological changes that took place as the yogi sat in a compact airtight wooden box with a glass door opening in front. With very limited amount of oxygen available, Yogiraj stayed in the box sitting for over seven hours with little noticeable physiological distress. In other words, the yogi was able to stay comfortable with very little consumption of oxygen relative to what is normally required.

Our work generated a lot of interest; and the Chief Minister of the state himself paid a visit to our laboratory. This is in stark contrast with the funding agencies like the University Grants Commission (UGC) who were reluctant to support academic study and research in yoga. At the time the Chairman and the Vice-Chairman of the UGC happened to know me personally, and were familiar with my academic credentials. I was successful in persuading them to fund our work. This was indeed the foundation that enabled me to continue for years my involvement in the study of and research in yoga. It is refreshing to note the current initiatives by the Government of India to promote yoga globally. Shri Narendra Modi successfully steered the United Nations to designate 21st June as International Yoga Day. This has cheered all of us who have been pleading for decades for a place for yoga in academic curricula.

Soon after the study of Yogiraj, I undertook a survey of yogis who were known or claimed to have supernormal powers. I found none I would consider as having any noticeable psychic abilities. Then, I went to a small institution in Pondicherry known as Anand Ashram and administered some standard parapsychological tests carried out by one of my students from Trinidad, West Indies. In some respects, the results were encouraging. Then, my moving to the US to head Rhine’s Institute of Parapsychology resulted in keeping aside my interest in yoga for nearly two decades.

My return to India resulted in a resurgence of my interest in yoga. My latest contribution in this area is the publication of the book Foundations of Yoga Psychology (2017). Several friends who read the Foundations suggested that a more condensed and affordable book containing mainly the text of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra, with psychological commentary would be a valuable addition to yoga literature. This prompted me to undertake this publication.

In this book, we attempt at an English translation of Patañjali’s Yogasūtra with commentary rendered in current psychological idiom. An extensive introductory chapter provides the context, and the concluding chapter attempts to draw out the implications of yoga theory and practices to current psychological knowledge.

There is not much that is original in this book. Most of it is drawn from the extensive literature that already exists. What I have done is to provide the psychological context and the relevance of studies of yoga for advancing psychological knowledge. It is my belief that the yoga paradigm goes well beyond what is currently in vogue and provides an alternative which is more inclusive and possibly provides a more fruitful model for studying and understanding human nature, hidden and manifest.

We consider yoga psychology as providing an interesting paradigm to study human behaviour with the goal of elevating human functioning to a different level of achievement and self-actualization. It goes well beyond studying human behaviour as something conditioned by learning and experience. It does away with all forms of reductionism and determinism, and attempts to open up a universe where freedom is the goal to be achieved through self-realization.

Yoga psychology indeed provides the foundation of what is now being developed under the rubric of Indian psychology. Indian psychology is an emerging discipline rooted in classical Indian tradition (Rao and Paranjpe, 2016). The basic postulate of Indian psychology is that the person is a unique composite of body, mind and consciousness, making a qualitative distinction between mind and consciousness. The goal of the person is self-actualization, which is realization of the self within. The self is not the manifest ego. It transcends all the hidden animal instincts. Indeed, it is one’s true being. Its realization/actualization is possible by cultivating consciousness as-such. Cultivating consciousness generates a kind of psycho-spiritual symbiosis, which in turn brings about personal transformation, altruistic value orientation, flowering of inner being, and manifestation of dormant psychic abilities.

I am grateful to Shri Narendra Modi, the hon’ble Prime Minister of India, for accepting my request to dedicate this book to him.

I have received much help from several of my colleagues in preparing this volume. They include my secretary Smt. Prasanna Kumari, who keeps me on track all the time keeping me alert without slipping into any kind of slumber, and Dr Rositta Joseph Valiyamattam, who had helped with the editing of the book. Again, my attendant in my office at GITAM University, Miss G. Kanaka cheerfully attends to all my routine needs in office. They all are part of my professional family. I acknowledge my appreciation for all their involvement and support.

K. Ramakrishna Rao

Visakhapatnam

8 November 2017

Contents

Preface

Contents

1. Introduction

Yoga: An Inclusive Psychology

Connection between Consciousness and Mind

The Nature of the Person

Multiplicity of the Puruṣas

Conclusion

2. Yoga Towards a Tranquil State of Mind (Samādhi)

Introduction

Yogasūtra of Patañjali

Background

On Samādhi

Theory of Mind

Control of the Mind

Concept of God

Hindrances to Control

Different Kinds of Samādhis

The Goal of Yoga

Summary

3. Yoga Practice (Sādhanā)

Kriyā-Yoga

Kleśas: Sources of Suffering

Karmāśaya: The Receptacle of Karma

The Existential Anguish

The Seer and the Seen

Person as Embodied Consciousness

Eightfold Yoga Practice

Saṁyama: Meditation

Summary

4. Yogic and Supernormal Powers (Siddhis)

Five States of the Mind

Psychic Powers

Summary

5. Freedom, Peace and Perfection through Yoga (Kaivalya)

Yoga Epistemology and Ontology

Reaching Kaivalya

Kleśa–Karma–Saṁskāra Nexus

Perception and Cognition

Connection between Consciousness and the Mind

Multiplicity of Puruṣas

Kaivalya: The State of Perfection

Summary

6. Metapsychology of Yoga

I. The Scope and Methods

II. Psychological Processes

III. The Existential Context and the Human Quest

IV. Implications and Applications

Some Concerns

Is Indian Psychology Inclusive?

Is Detachment Psychologically Healthy?

Is Indian Psychology Pessimistic?

Summary

Bibliography

Index

1

Introduction

India from its antiquity is a land conspicuous by its philosophical outlook. It has been India’s tradition to look beyond the existential situation and think about states of being more enduring than the passing events. It was not the past and the history of what had gone by that became the chief subject of concern, but the future where one would go, the goals to be achieved, the methods to be adopted and the guideposts to look for in the process. Thus, what is truly a sustaining force behind Indian philosophical inquiry is the search for the permanent and eternal and not the ephemeral and the changing. It is the relentless and diligent search for the main supporting substratum underlying all change that interested Indian thinkers from antiquity. The futuristic perspective is thus an indelible characteristic underlying the mainstream of Indian thought. However, the future is seen embedded in the present. It is a holographic conception. In a sense, it is an interesting postulation of eternal present, which may be seen as dispensing with the category of time altogether. This might look like a paradox; but the resolution of such seeming incongruities was a challenge which philosophers in India did not shy away from addressing.

While the goal of the search remains an ideal, the search itself is practical. Yoga¹ stands for both the search and what is sought after. In this context, the goal to be achieved and the method of achieving become reflexive of each other. Means and ends thus become two faces of the same coin. Perhaps, a more appropriate analogy is that of the seed and the tree, like the acorn and the oak. Yoga may be seen as the seed as well as the tree of Indian philosophical tradition. The tradition involves more than the Hindu systems of thought, which no doubt, are its main branches. The other branches include Buddhism, Jainism and numerous other lesser known ones. Yoga has germinated and manifested in many distinct forms. Indeed, yoga is central and occupies the pivotal position in Indian way of life – its thought, passion and action. It is integral, binding intellectual pursuits, emotional engagement and daily activities in the Indian way of life. Not only is yoga an index of Indian culture, it may also be seen as a mark of Indian identity.

The antecedents of yoga may be traced to wandering ascetics. These ascetics included people seeking pleasures as well as those who denounced them and deprived themselves of mundane sensuous gratification. Some scholars called them wandering swarms of ascetics. Some other writers described the yogic exercises of that time as ecstatic rites of savages (see Ramachandra Rao, 2005). What we have come to know as Yoga system since the time of Patañjali (about 200 bce) is what Patañjali by his own admission gleaned, edited and systematized. Yoga did not originate with him. From all evidence, Yoga and yogic practices predate the Vedic period. Patañjali’s Yogasūtra and various important commentaries following it such as those of Vyāsa, Vācaspati, Vijñānabhikṣu and Bhoja, as Ramachandra Rao (2005: 3) notes, refer to the Yoga sanctified by the Vedic tradition.

It would seem that yoga in antiquity was the general and accepted ascetic culture of the time. It was not theory loaded or theistically oriented. It was just a way of life, characterizing the people of the time. Such a conclusion may seem odd to those who have come to regard Yoga as a system of Hindu philosophy. However, the fact that yoga practices were not limited to Hindus and were part of the way of life of Buddhists and other non-theistic systems of thought needs to be taken serious note of, when we discuss yoga. It seems more reasonable to think that yoga is a native Indian culture not limited by or confined to any single system of philosophy. However, it is essentially native in its origin, its philosophy, practice and application.

If India has sponsored the United Nation’s resolution to have an International Yoga Day, it does not imply that Yoga is trans-Indian in its origin. Rather it may be seen as being an extension of the Indian conception of vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam (the notion of universal brotherhood).

If Sāṁkhya provided the theoretical/knowledge base of Indian culture, Yoga showed its practical applications in life. It is our contention that yoga is the seed and that Indian thought and culture from antiquity to the present constitute the tree that grew out of it. In a nutshell, the goal of human endeavour in Indian tradition is freedom. Yoga’s goal is liberation; it is liberation from mental constraints. Yogic practices are the ways to achieve liberation. Thus yoga constitutes the goal as well as the means to achieve that goal.

Liberation is self-realization. Self-realization is discovering one’s true self. In modern psychological terminology, it is self-actualization. This has been the theme of Indian philosophical pursuit since antiquity. As the Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad notes:

Verily, the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be perceived, to be marked, O Maitreyī! When the Self has been seen, heard, perceived, and known, then all this is known

– IV.5.8; Max Müller, 1895: 183.

Self-discovery is thus the goal; and yoga is a means to reach that goal.

Human mind is a mix of thinking, feeling and action. In the existential situation we hardly find a stable balance between them. This is because the human mind is in a constant state of flux and hence the need to control the ever wandering states of the mind. In one person, knowing may be a characteristic way of functioning. In another, it may be feeling or doing. Consequently, yoga needs to address the three types of people driven predominantly by thinking, feeling or action. This calls for three basic kinds of yoga – jñāna (knowledge), bhakti (devotion) and karma (action). Self-realization may be sought by pursuing the path of knowledge (jñāna-yoga) devotion/faith (bhakti-yoga) or action (karma-yoga). However, the three are not exclusive. One may combine them in various proportions. This happens often in most people, even though one characteristic element may be more dominant than others.

Now, we should not lose sight of the fact that the self and the ego (the sense of I-ness) are not the same. Ego often masquerades as the self and acts as an obstruction to self-realization. Self-realization is not possible unless the ego is brought under control and eventually eliminated altogether. This calls for cultivating altruism as a pervasive value. Altruism involves overcoming the limitations of the self confined to a single identity and extending it to include others, seeing the same self in others as well.

Having said all this, and recognizing that yoga is more than body-culture as it has come to be seen, we may not fail to acknowledge the fact that Patañjali’s Yogasūtra remains the most authentic and systematic presentation of yoga in its theoretical and practical aspects. What is an interesting and less realized fact is that yoga is also a consummate system of psychology containing the quintessence of what may be dubbed as Indian psychology. Further, it has the potential for multi-dimensional application, complementing in significant ways the current areas of applied psychology. In our discussion, we use Indian psychology and Yoga psychology as synonymous expressions.

Yoga is the central theme of applied Indian psychology. Indian psychology is a system of psychology rooted in classical Indian thought, which provides an alternate paradigm sharply different from the current Western models widely in vogue in psychological theory and practice. The focus of Indian psychology and yoga is on gaining control over mental processes so as to gain access to consciousness as-such. Meditation is one of the techniques for achieving mind control. Thus meditation and yoga are interconnected. However, yoga is not merely broader in scope than meditation; it accommodates a wide variety of techniques and theoretical perspectives. Thus we have jñāna-yoga, bhakti-yoga, karma-yoga and several other kinds of yoga. Each of these has own theoretical underpinning. Again, meditation may be seen from different perspectives and involve different techniques. However, the common connecting ground of yoga and meditation is their postulation of states of pure consciousness which are accessible to humans but are irreducible to events in the brain.

Patañjali’s Yogasūtra is the basic text of yogic theory and practice. The goal of yoga practice, according to Patañjali, is to control the natural tendency of the mind to wander. The method of controlling mental drifting consists in obtaining a certain attentional focus called ekāgratā. When the wanderings or mental fluctuations are controlled one reaches a state of stillness, mental quiescence, quietude and absorption, which enables the person to have direct access to consciousness as-such in a state of samādhi. The purpose of Patañjali’s yoga is to attain the niruddha state where the psychic fluctuations (vr̥ttis) are completely restrained and controlled; and the person in that state is believed to gain access to truth as-such. This can be achieved by practising certain psychophysical exercises that include focused attention and concentration.

The mind is set in fluctuation not only by sensory stimulations, it presently receives or recalls, but also by the subliminal factors called vāsanās and saṁskāras. The vāsanās are basic tendencies, either inborn or acquired. Having their own dynamism, they constantly strive for expression in consciousness and precipitative vr̥ttis. A good deal of man’s experience is determined by these inborn tendencies. Unless these vāsanās are revealed, controlled and eradicated, the citta (mind) cannot be fully restrained. Yoga practice, therefore, aims not only at the shutting out of the external inputs provided by sensory stimulation but also the burning of the subliminal latencies so that the niruddha state is attained and one can access consciousness as-such.

The citta is not merely a canvas on which one’s sensory inputs are imprinted. It is not merely a passive plastic state that takes on various forms. As Dasgupta (2005: 286) puts it:

There is also the reserve power in it called the śakti, by virtue of which it can reflect and react back upon itself and change the passivity of its transformations into active states associated with will and effort. Thus, man’s thoughts and actions are pure psychological determinations. But there in the citta is the reserve force by which it can act upon itself and determine itself. This force gets its full play in the strong effort required in meditation by which a particular state is sought to be kept in a steady condition as a check against the natural flowing tendency.

Patañjali’s rāja-yoga formulates a psychophysiological method involving eight steps to control the fluctuations of the psyche, the vr̥ttis. The first two are yama and niyama which include certain moral commandments such as truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, cleanliness and contentment. The next two, āsana and prāṇāyāma, are physical exercises that involve sitting in comfortable postures and practising breath control. The fifth stage, pratyāhāra, is a special kind of introspection, a passive-attentive state, designed to understand the workings of psyche and guiding it in pursuit of truth and freedom. The last three – dhāraṇā (concentration), dhyāna (contemplation) and samādhi (a standstill state of psyche) – are the most important ones in attaining the yogic meditative state. In fact, meditation proper refers to these practices and the others are simply preliminaries.

The need for ethical and physiological practices in yogic training is not difficult to understand. Desires and sensory indulgence encourage further involvement in the sensory processes resulting in the constant fluctuations of the psyche which are precisely what yoga seeks to control. The physical exercises are also designed to control internal processes, to reduce the sensory noise from outside and to ensure bodily health, the loss of which would be a source of distractions.

The pratyāhāra, the introspective stage is quite important. It enables one to focus on certain internal monitoring processes, some sort of biofeedback. It is what appears to be the connecting link between the physiological and the psychological exercises. It is by introspection that the practitioner of yoga is able to learn how to regulate the body to suit the requirements of his mental states. Such introspection, it would seem, enables the yogin to isolate those experiences, which he is seeking, and to produce them at will later.

Now, the object of all these exercises is to enable one to concentrate. There are some who can achieve desired levels of concentration without the recommended exercises. They could skip them. Concentration (dhāraṇā) produces in us a state in which the natural wandering of our thoughts, the fluctuations of the psyche, are brought under control. In a state of concentration, the psyche attends to one thing so that there is intensification of activity of the mind in that direction. In it, the focus of attention is narrowed, which is expanded when one goes from concentration to contemplation (dhyāna). Contemplation helps to concentrate longer and to fix one’s attention on any object for a length of time with ease and in an effortless manner. When this is achieved, the psyche progresses to a standstill state in which the mind is steady and becomes one with the object of concentration. In other words, it experiences consciousness as-such in the state of stillness. The triple effort of dhāraṇā–dhyāna–samādhi is called saṁyama. Saṁyama is meditation in its totality. Saṁyama leads one to experience pure states of consciousness and access consciousness as-such.

Yoga: An Inclusive Psychology

Contemporary psychology is essentially biocentric. Its widely shared assumptions are that the person is a brain-driven machine and that one’s achievements and actions, beliefs and behaviour, cognition and conduct can be studied scientifically and understood in their entirety following a mechanical or computer-simulated model within the mechanistic/reductionist framework. Indeed, during the past several decades psychology has made rapid strides giving credibility to the claim that human thought, passion and action are ultimately reducible to what goes on in one’s brain. Such being the case, it would be clearly audacious and imprudent, and even foolhardy, to speak about and champion the cause of a psychology with emphasis on the notion of consciousness as-such. Such an emphasis may be interpreted as conflicting with, if not contradicting the mainstream paradigm of scientific psychology. However, we venture to attempt such a study. Notwithstanding the enormous gains in our understanding of human nature made by the neuro-centric reductionism, there are glaring gaps in our knowledge of the way humans think, feel and act, and the fact that these in principle appear to be uncomfortably unbridgeable, calls for bold initiatives for developing more inclusive models.

Let me briefly refer to these gaps. First, consciousness in the sense of subjectivity is largely left out by the mainstream psychology. Behaviourism during its heydays attempted to banish consciousness from the precincts of psychology. Cognitive psychology, though a bit more hospitable to admit consciousness as a legitimate area of inquiry, has not gone beyond studying some functional aspects leaving the phenomenological aspects of consciousness little touched. This is so because, it would seem, consciousness is simply not accessible for third-person observation (Nagel, 1974) and there is an intrinsic explanatory gap in the attempts to explain conscious subjectivity in computational terms (Levine, 1983). Notwithstanding the many heroic efforts to generate artificial subjectivity in the so-called machine consciousness. I see little hope of realizing consciousness in any computational machine, even with conceivable advances in nanotechnology. The axiomatic rejection of inner experience and the persistent insistence of diehard eliminatists like Dennett (1991) and Blackmore (2003) that the notion of subjectivity is conceptually confused and scientifically incoherent, suggest to me that the crucial aspects of subjectivity may not be captured within the reductionist paradigm. Equally unconvincing are the attempts to account for subjectivity within the computational framework in terms of hypothetical cognitive processes such as the global workspace model of Bernard Baars (1988). I have dealt with these issues elsewhere at some length (Rao, 2002).

Second, there is significant evidence (Rao and Palmer, 1987; Radin, 1997, 2006) to suggest that awareness may occur without being mediated by sensory processes, as is believed to be the case with extrasensory perception (ESP). The defining characteristic of an ESP experience or a psychic event is that there is no physically identifiable causal connection between such an experience and its presumed source, i.e. the object of awareness. Also, the evidence for precognition, the ability to have non-inferrential awareness of a future event and the success of long-distance ESP experiments suggest that time and space are not limiting conditions for the occurrence of ESP, unlike in normal perceptions. If such is indeed the case, as the evidence strongly suggests, then ESP is utterly different from other cortically mediated cognitive processes. The alleged cases of reincarnation and presumptive memories from a previous birth, which stand on a less solid foundation than ESP, if genuine and if they turn out to be what they are claimed to be (Stevenson, 1974), then extra-cerebral memory, like ESP strikes at the very root of neuro-centric reductionism and calls for a qualitatively different explanatory framework.

Third, the claimed experiences of mystics around the world during the long history